Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 33

"But it sounds like you have friends, that you have fun with people."

"What made you decide that?"

"I hear laughter coming from socialita." I wasn't allowed to go to the evening social time.

She rolled her eyes. "That's all bulls.h.i.+t. It's lighthearted, but everyone's fake."

How could everyone be fake? People are people.

"Prison is bad. You'll see." She leaned toward me. "Wait until you've been here awhile." She laid out the facts: "Prisoners and guards are in different worlds. The guards are the enemy. They're only here to judge us."

"They don't seem so bad," I said.

Cera scoffed. "You don't know what they say about you when you're outside-'Who does Kuh-nox think she is? She's saving worms from the rain but killing people.' Even Lupa says you're guilty."

I knew the prosecution didn't believe me, but I'd a.s.sumed the people I interacted with every day would see me for who I was and not imagine the worst. As soon as Cera said this, it seemed obvious-of course the guards would a.s.sume I was a murderer. Everyone did.

"The way to get along here is to appease the guards," Cera said. "Instill confidence in other prisoners. But mind your own business. And don't trust anyone."

I changed the subject. "Do you mind if I ask how old you are? And how long you've been in prison?"

She looked at me with the exaggerated patience of an adult speaking to a child. Until then, I didn't know that prisoners consider personal questions off-limits.

"I'm twenty-three," she said. "I've been in prison almost six years-of a twenty-five-year sentence. They say I murdered my boyfriend."

Oh my G.o.d. Hearing that made my heart hurt.

She continued. "I know how you feel, being the center of attention right now. Don't worry. They'll forget about you once the next sensational crime comes along."

As much as I wanted to be out of the limelight, the word forget terrified me, and hearing "twenty-five years" made my stomach lurch. I wanted to cry for her-and for myself. "Was the media tough on you?" I asked.

She flashed me another condescending look. "Journalists fixate on something and turn you into a symbol of evil," she said. "They say you have 'an angel face but a demon's soul.' Did you hear about Alberto Stasi?" He was accused of killing his girlfriend in August 2007. "Remember how the media reported that he has 'eyes of ice,' because they're blue. It was ice for me, too. They made me sound like a psychopath, because I like to chew on ice."

How am I still this nave?

"Maybe we shouldn't talk about it," she said. "Save yourself the indignity."

Cera was right. When she talked she seemed angry and bitter. I didn't want to go there with her.

At twenty, I still had a childlike view of people. I looked for the saving graces in everyone. I thought people were naturally empathetic, that they felt ashamed and guilty when they mistreated someone else. That faith in humanity was being picked away, but I held to the belief that people were basically good. And that good people would believe me and set me free.

Part of the growing up I did in prison was learning that people are complicated, and that some will do something wrong to achieve what they think is right. Since my second interrogation with Mignini, I knew the prosecution was intent on undermining my alibi. Over the coming weeks and months, I would learn just how far they would go to try to prove me guilty.

In early January, Raffaele's father went on a popular Italian news program to convince viewers that his son had had nothing to do with Meredith's murder. "The b.l.o.o.d.y shoeprints in the villa were made by Rudy Guede," he said. The pattern of eleven concentric circles on the sole of Guede's Nike Outbreak 2s matched the prints on the floor. Dr. Sollecito produced a duplicate pair of the Nikes so TV viewers could see. A corresponding s...o...b..x was found in Guede's apartment, he added.

The prints couldn't have been made by Raffaele's newer Nike Air Force 1s, he said. "They had just seven concentric circles." By show's end he had removed the possibility that Raffaele had been at the murder scene and put another strike against Guede. Raffaele's family must have felt euphoric.

But their elation didn't last twenty-four hours. The next morning, the prosecution announced new "evidence." The killer had slashed Meredith's bra off her body, slicing off a small strip of fabric that included part of the clasp. Raffaele's DNA was on the clasp.

"There's no way!" I said loudly. "It's impossible."

"I'm sure the police timed their announcement about the bra clasp to win the public back to their side after the show," Luciano said. "It's not a coincidence. Raffaele's lawyers made a terrible mistake going through the media instead of bringing their findings directly to the court."

I knew this "evidence" could hurt us. I also knew that Raffaele had as much chance of coming into contact with Meredith's bra as Meredith had meeting up with a knife from Raffaele's apartment. Neither could be true, but the prosecution would use both these findings to tie us to the crime.

"Raffaele's DNA must have been transferred to the clasp somehow," Carlo said. "Did you ever wear Meredith's clothes or share a load of laundry?"

"I borrowed tights and a s.h.i.+rt but never her bra," I answered. "And we washed our clothes separately. But we did dry them side by side on the same rack. Do you think that could be it?"

It turned out there was another possible explanation.

On December 18, forty-six days after the Polizia Scientifica first swept the villa for evidence, the Rome-based forensic police returned to No. 7, Via della Pergola.

Luciano and one of Raffaele's lawyers watched a live feed of the search from a van parked outside the villa. The investigators were dressed in white suits, shoe coverings, and gloves to protect the crime scene from contamination-but it was too late for that. The Squadra Mobile, or "Flying Squad," had already ransacked the house, tramping from room to room. While looking for Meredith's credit cards, keys, and other nonforensic clues, they'd dragged Meredith's mattress into the kitchen. Her unhinged armoire doors were on the floor. Her clothes were in heaps. The forensic team found the bra clasp under a rolled-up carpet, lying beneath a sock.

I wasn't implicated by the clasp, but I knew that the prosecution would never believe that Raffaele had acted without me. They'd say I gave him access to the villa. I was the reason he'd met Meredith. We were each other's alibis. If they could show that Raffaele was directly connected to the crime, I would, at the very least, be charged as his accomplice.

The bra clasp wasn't the only incriminating news the prosecution leaked to the press that day. "CSI Technique Leads Italian Police to b.l.o.o.d.y Footprint in Foxy Knoxy's Bedroom," the London Daily Mail wrote. The article quoted Edgardo Giobbi, an investigator for the police, who said, "This is a crucial discovery and very important."

Luciano told me the low points. "They say your feet were 'dripping with blood'-that you tracked blood while you were trying to clean it up."

The forensic team used luminol, a chemical that glows blue when sprayed on even trace amounts of hemoglobin. It revealed two footprints in the hallway outside the bathroom and one in my bedroom.

"How can they say I had Meredith's blood on the bottoms of my feet?" I asked.

"Please don't worry, Amanda," Carlo said, giving me a sympathetic look. "I'm sure it's not as simple and straightforward as the media are portraying it. We've already spoken with our experts, and they say that you might have stepped on the blood splotch on the bathmat and tracked it down the hall. That could do it. And it's not just blood that shows up in luminol. It reacts the same to household cleaners, soil, juice, and rust from the faucet-anything that contains iron or peroxides. To know for sure what they're looking at, forensic scientists have to test separately with another chemical"-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB)-"that's sensitive only to human blood."

"Well, did they?" I asked anxiously.

"It's frustrating, but we'll have to wait until the investigation phase ends so we can see how the Polizia Scientifica reached their conclusions," Carlo answered.

Perhaps it was better that we didn't know then it would be twenty-two nerve-rattling months before we found out how the forensic scientists had made this misleading call.

This new claim was another barricade separating me from my real life-one more accusation on a growing list. Too many impossible things were being served up as "truth"-Meredith's DNA on Raffaele's kitchen knife, Raffaele's DNA on Meredith's bra clasp, and now Meredith's blood on the soles of my feet.

It was crazy enough to be told that "investigative instinct" had convinced the police I was involved in Meredith's murder-that I was dangerous and evil. Now forensic science-the supposedly foolproof tests I was counting on to clear me-was turning up findings I knew were wrong. I, like most people who get their information from TV crime shows, was unaware that forensic evidence has to be interpreted, that human error and bias can, and do, upend results.

"I don't get it," I told my dad at his next visit. "How can this be happening? Raffaele and I weren't there, so how can there be any evidence pointing to us?"

I felt so weighed down, so helpless and sad, that all I could do was cry while Dad held me. "Are the police just really bad at their jobs?" I wailed. "They're getting further and further away from the truth. How can the investigators make three incriminating errors in a row? What will they find next?"

But I tried not to think too far ahead. I'd already had to tell Mom good-bye. She's an elementary school teacher who had used all her vacation and sick days to be with me. My defense was costing far more than my parents had. She had to get back to work. Thank G.o.d Dad was there for me. I couldn't fathom how I would get through this without my parents.

Incensed by the stream of falsehoods, I concluded what my lawyers and my dad already knew: the police and the prosecutor couldn't afford to admit they'd made a mistake. They'd announced, "Case closed," at the press conference the day Raffaele and I were arrested. They would stick to their story at all costs.

I always liked seeing my lawyers, but now I had to brace myself for each visit. I didn't have to wait long before they brought more devastating news.

Less than a week later, investigators reported that they'd found my DNA mixed with Meredith's blood ringing the drain of the bidet in our shared bathroom. The implication was that I'd rinsed my hands and feet in the bidet after slas.h.i.+ng her throat. They said that my skin cells had shown up-not Raffaele's or Rudy Guede's-because I was the last person to wash up in that bathroom.